Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Training Pilots

A week ago I visited PMI, The Pacific Maritime Institute, during their program development and harbor pilot training. I had the opportunity to watch training development, and pilot testing.

PMI wrote the training program with event sets similar to that airline pilot program training events. The difference was the testing process. There was team of subject matter experts that sat in a room and observed a the first group of harbor pilots being tested. We all observed them on the video, monitoring their actions and dialogue. Then the debrief was from an operational perspective, what the pilots did, why, what worked with the program, what didn't ... why or why not. They tweaked the program, and then...

They had another crew, who had no knowledge of the program, go into the simulator and they were the next test subjects.

What this all reminded me of was the power of continual improvement, subject matter experts, and videos in the simulator!!

The photo above, center screen, was the simulator we watched the pilots and captain. The top screen displayed what the instruments were doing, and the lower screen not only showed the instruments, but the ship track, radar, radius...etc. Basically we saw everything the crew did, watched how they set up their instruments, and at the end they discussed their what they would do differently and why.

The airline industry should adapt the process of how PMI trains harbor pilots, to training airline pilots. If anyone wants cameras in the aircraft think twice. I say put cameras in the simulators to improve the quality of training through quality debriefing. That's how we learn.